Letter writing is a sweet & considerate form of communication that I love participating in. Furthermore, writing letters has been a part of abolitionist & Black Feminist praxis for a long time. Although some may consider the letter-writing practice outdated, I prefer the word ancient. Writing letters requires one to set aside time in their present to pen their thoughts, catch up with loved ones, & ask queries of the recipient to read in the future. Perhaps the most intriguing of the process for me is that organized letter recipients preserve these correspondence in their archives (or make them public). Whether I’m reading Toni Cade Bambera’s 1980 letter to Octavia Butler or James Baldwin’s An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis the care & respect in the letters is my favorite thing to take note of. I often write to people, alive or who are ancestors, whose life experiences I feel will guide me the way I need to go. This is the most recent letter I wrote to Zora Neale Hurston.
Thursday, November 30th, 2023 @ 10:31 p.m.
Dear Zora,
It’s been a hot minute since I talked to just you. I think the last time I did was when I wrote you that poem in the eighth grade. That was the very first time I heard about you. Madre let me read Speak Now So You Can Speak Again for my English research project. Madre always kept that orange book up so I couldn’t get to it. But this time when I asked & explained why she handed it over to me. I would like to think that Madre believed that it was the right time for me to meet you.
Then I re-met you when I ran into you on the pages of Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Garden. Just like last time, Madre kept Alice’s book out of my hands for what seemed like forever too. Until the summer of 2017, at 16 years old, she let me take it with me to a summer program in Ithaca, New York. I took that lavender book lined with pink border everywhere with me. I re-read the definition of womanism & your chapter over & over again. I had every intention of studying anthropology in college because of you. That summer was when Alice told me how she placed a headstone on your previously unmarked grave down in Florida. I didn’t see how society could let that happen to you back then. But now, at 23, I see exactly how it happened.
I know exactly how it happened because I fear the same thing happening to me. I know exactly how it happened because between 16 & 23 I came across many people who seemed determined to push me toward that same fate. Yesterday Zora, you found me again. This time you found me in your very own PBS Documentary! Isn’t that something? While I was watching I saw more of myself in you than I ever have before. I’ve got questions for you & I know you will most likely say the years will answer eventually. But, I’m gonna write them out for you anyway.
In your film, they framed the opening & the ending with the fact that you were always jumpin’ for de sun. It was a sayin’ you mother used to tell you, “we might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.” You placed no limits on yourself & never paid any mind to those who tried to place them on you. When I was 16, I knew that you went to Barnard College & I was amazed at how a Southern Black woman could be so brave to go up north to pursue education. I had no idea how much attending a school like Barnard cost (financially & spiritually). I know better now seeing that I also went to a seven-sister college. But it seems like you navigated campus by playing into things that didn’t demean you to get what you needed. You always remind yourself & played up your difference to get your desired result. You were always jumpin’ for de sun.
You were already published & friends with the likes of people like Langston Hughes cause you came to New York on a mission. You were invited to the 1924 Opportunity first annual literature awards & were the most decorated person that night. A fellow anthropologist in your documentary, Irma McClaurin, said "At that moment in time, Harlem is also about respectability. People are wanting to move away from the Southern culture, because it's seen as lower class. And Zora brings her Southerness with her because she's not ashamed of it." I think she captured your audacity perfectly! You know I launched the Disturbers Of The South Archive (D.OT.S.), right? Yep, after three years of research, I launched it on August 3rd. Learning about you in eighth grade was the first time I saw a fellow Southerner think about the South in a serious way. Like you, I was never ashamed of the South & always referred to it as home unabashedly. I always knew that southern soil had my ancestors in it & that makes it home to me.
I remember seeing your pictures in the eighth grade for the first time. You were in a standing squat, with your arms by your ribs & hands pointing outward like a bird preparing to fly. You looked like you were getting ready to jump for de sun with a sly smile on your face. Like you had already achieved it. You & I both know Southern respectability politics all too well. I grew up in the Baptist church but at least my father was not a preacher like yours. I remember my grandma having a fit when I started my locs, got my nose pierced, & got my first tattoos. Up until then, I had just repeated everything I heard her say growin’ up. I remember tellin’ some white girl in elementary school who had put pink streaks in her hair that “if God wanted you to be born with pink hair, he would’ve made you come out that way.” I said that about everything that involved creatively expressing yourself by changing your appearance. These were the words I said because I spent a lot of time with my grandma growing up. Grandma was very rooted in the church & thus rooted in Southern respectability politics. However, middle school is when I started reading more & making my own opinions. So much of my belief-making had to do with untangling myself from respectability’s roots that I was planted in from birth. It was a difficult thing to free myself from but once I did it’s hard to go back to it. I guess that’s how you came to feel about Harlem’s respectability at one point or another. Despite the fact that they wanted you to act, talk, & move a certain way you brought your authentic Southerness with you.
Southerness at it’s core is an unabashed release of contagious freedom. Southerness is freedom found in the land, in the moving body, in the relaxed dialect, & in the pace of Southern life itself. In D.O.T.S. one of the categories I group archival materials in is labeled generational freedom. This label is based on an excerpt of James Baldwin doing a radio interview in which he claims that Southern Black folks are much stronger & freer with each generation. Baldwin gave the example of the little girl who integrated Little Rock & said that “it’s because she knew who she was. And after all, that child has been coming for a very long time. She didn’t come from nothing.” The last part of Baldwin’s statement has always stuck with me. So often, Black Southerners are made to feel that we came from dust & will return back to dust sooner than others by reaching an early death. You always knew that you didn’t come from nothing. You came from Eatonville, a Black self-sufficient town and the Sunshine State. This sense of generational freedom that only amplifies with each generation of Black Southerners exists in the spirit. No matter where you go, even if you leave the region they believe to be the South, that Southernness is always within you. I didn’t know how Southern I was until I left the South to go up North for school & until I went abroad. In your documentary, someone narrating you read your writing reflecting on how you too needed to leave the South to better understand it. While reflecting on writing Mules & Men you wrote that "it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off & look at my garment." Yet another intersecting point where our lives mirror each other.
How did you come to balance your new academic lens (anthropological lens) of seeing your family & friends with who you were prior to leaving home? I know for your research you did this by immersing yourself in the Southern communities you were studying. But the film said that you “had come home, but her education had made her an outsider.” Was it the language you were using with folks? How did you hold the new academic knowledge, your embodied knowledge as a Southern daughter of Eatonville & your desire to be in the community? Your film talked a great deal about how you did this with your anthropological research but what about your chosen community? The only close friendship the film highlighted was yours with Langston. Even that friendship eventually ended after falling out over a collaborative project. Who was rallying for you & around you in your personal life?
I’m curious because it can feel daunting to chart your own path. I am blessed with a handful of people in my life whose questions, the way they hold space for me, & freely affirm me make me wonder if I am returning it back to them in the proper way. Or maybe I’m just amazed at how freely they show up in the world & for me; which then pushes me to want to do the same. Without those handful of people, I would not have had the courage to start my Assemblage publication or the archive. These handfuls of people affirm that the possibility of a more free & equitable future exists because they exist. Moreover, I have come to accept that the possibility of a more free and equitable future exists because I also exist. In your life, you must have always known the latter. But did your belief in a free & equitable future that valued your people ever falter? And if it did, who did you turn to to re-affirm the magic in the world? Your film mentioned that while you were conducting anthropology fieldwork you collected love letters for a book you wanted to write about black love. Whatever happened to all those love letters? I’d love to read them now as a reminder of the magic in the world.
Speaking of magic, I guess the fact that I have never heard of these love letters was a result of your fairy Godmother Charlotte Osgood Mason. It was Langston who introduced you to Mason. Mason was the one who made you & Langston call her Godmother. What is it with white people trying to salvage, claim, & take credit for magic that exists in Black bodies? I just wrote about this in my last piece when I explored Phillis Wheatley’s poetic work in Boston. You would have loved that piece. I’ll read it to you some other time. Apparently, Mason forced you to keep detailed accounts of what you spent money on during the Southern travels she was funding for you. On one of last trips down South, you had to beg Mason for money for a new pair of shoes. Mason gave you new shoes & just $75 in spending money for your trip. This, & the different goals between you two, seemed to be the start of the end of your patronage relationship. Additionally, your doc said that you couldn’t work for somebody else for long. I feel that sentiment more than you know. I hate reporting to other people & being required to document how I’m spending the resources of time & money. In every job I’ve ever had, there is always a level of surveillance taking place. It seems like someone is always watching & if deemed necessary, they will correct, discipline, & punish improper behavior. One of my baby sisters just learned this difficult lesson at her first job (fast food). The managers, not present in the building, would watch the employees (mostly high schoolers) on the security camera during their shifts. If they did something wrong, they would get a text of how to correct it & a reminder that if the behavior wasn’t fixed they would be terminated. My sister quit & ended up getting a new job. I told her, you always have the right to pivot in life & it doesn’t have to make sense to anybody else. We are all just trying to stitch together an assemblage that we can call our life in the end. I love what you told Mason in a letter you wrote back to her. You wrote, "I shall wrestle me up a future or die trying." But why do we always have to wrestle and struggle?
You know that scene in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom where Levee gets as mad as hot fish grease at Toledo for stepping on his shoes? I know you probably know August Wilson’s play but the way that scene comes to my mind is in the film adaptation. They adapted August’s play in 2020 & Levee is played by the late great Chadwick Boseman (originally from South Carolina). Chadwhick’s performance was breathtakingly gorgeous. I can hear him right now saying you done stepped on my shoes. While Levee bought his yellow shoes, partly with money from the band, & you had to beg for yours the importance of having a sturdy foundation to chart a new path in the world is clear. Was Mason the one who ran your shoes down into the ground in the first place? At least you let her live, by parting ways with her, so she could reach a better end than Toledo.
Although if you had taken the same actions as Levee I could understand why. Like Levee, you had ambitions & dreams about where you wanted your life to go. Although you didn’t have bandmates you had a committee of academic supporters. Or so you thought you had a committee of academics who genuinely supported you. Here is the sore where you & I seem to intersect once again. Being surrounded by people who give the illusion of pouring into you when in person. However, when it is time to let the record reflect public support those same individuals are nowhere to be found. Or worse, they willingly accept speaking on your behalf & drag your name through filth.
My publication, Assemblage, would not be possible if I hadn’t completed my senior thesis. Yet, my original thesis committee tried to force me to pivot into a creative project. I was ambushed into a meeting, exactly one year ago, that left me confused & exhausted. It’s exhausting trying to prove why your intellectual inquiries are deserving of a lengthy exploration or funding. What made this moment worse for me was the fact that one thesis committee member was writing a recommendation for my grad school application at the time. That meeting made me doubt what that Professor was writing in my recommendation letter. If she was telling me false shortcomings about my thesis to my face how could I trust her pen? For a while, that meeting & those professors made me doubt my abilities to continue writing a thesis. That is until I remembered who the fuck I was. I reminded myself of who I was by writing. Whenever I write & read my work out loud I am reminded of the power & magic within me. I never got back to my former thesis committee about how I was “pivoting” my thesis. I did, however, go above them to the chair of my department, submit my on-time proposal, & continued my thesis under my department chair’s guidance. I learned that tenacity from you. I kept jumping for de sun & you did too.
Determined to find a new source of funding, you applied for a Guggenheim fellowship & reached out to people you believed would speak highly on your behalf. Your application was superb but your recommenders did you dirty once again. Your beloved Franz Boas wrote that “on the whole her methods are more journalistic than scientific & I am not under the impression that she is just the right caliber for a Guggenheim Fellowship.” Unironically, you & fellow students of Boas referred to him as Papa Boas. Yet again, I find the trend of older white folks intentionally bestowing benevolent titles upon themselves disgusting. It’s as if they want to separate themselves and be honored with a title for extending opportunities to underrepresented communities. When in reality, most of the time, they come up short in their seemingly good intentions. The violence within academia is a tricky one to understand initially. It’s a lot of smiling, amplifying, diversifying, turning every verb into a gerund when there needs to be stillness. Stillness & silence are necessary to listen to the demands of resources of marginalized communities. The language used in academia is their very first tell. Right caliber or material was used in your Guggenheim recommendation letters. Zora, did you sign away your rights to read your recommendation letters? Or did you know that this betrayal took place & prevented you from receiving the financial support to record the community you were a part of? I’m sorry if this is the first time you are hearing of this. I by no means wanted to be the one to break the news to you. Time does help heal wounds but new information can open them right back up. I signed away my rights to my recommendation letters but I intuitively knew something within them was wrong. During this time, & the first time I applied to college, I remember looking up at the sky & thinking of Mama’s words when they couldn’t move in Act III of Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun.
MAMA: (She sits down, fingers to her brow, thinking) Lord, ever since I was a little girl, I always remembers people saying “Lena—Lena Eggleston, you aims too high all the time. You needs to slow down and see life a little more like it is. Just slow down some.” That’s what they always used to say down home —“Lord, that Lena Eggleston is high-minded thing. She will get due one day!” RUTH: No, Lena... MAMA: Me and Big Walter just didn't ever learn right. RUTH: Lena, no! We gotta go. Bennie—tell her.. She rises and crosses to BENEATHA with her arms out-stretched. BENEATHA doesn't respond) Tell her we can still move. .. the note ain’t but a hundred and twenty-five a month. We got four grown people in this house—we can work. MAMA: (Too herself) Just aimed too high all the time— RUTH: (Turning and going to MAMA fast—the words pouring out with urgency and despiration) Lena—I’ll work… I’ll work twenty hours a day in all the kitchens in Chicago...I’ll strap my baby on my back if I have to and scrub all the floors in America and wash all the sheets in America if I have to—But we got to MOVE! We got to get OUT OF HERE!! MAMA: No—I see things differently now. Been thinking 'bout some of the things we could do to fix this place up some. I seen a secondhand bureau over on Maxwell Street just the other day that could fit right here. (She points to where the new funiture might go. RUTH wanders away from her) Would need some new handles on it and then a little varnish and it look like something brand-new. And—we can put up them new curtains in the kitchen ... Why this place be looking fine. Cheer us all up so we forget trouble ever come... (To RUTH) And you could get some nice screens to put up in your room 'round the baby's bassinet... (She looks at both of them, pleadingly) Sometimes you just got to know when to give up some things... and hold on to what you got...
Have you ever felt that way while jumpin’ for de sun? Have you ever felt like you just aimed too high? At the time you didn’t have the proper credentials that would make you a certified knowledge producer to your recommenders. To Boas and others that credential was a P.h.d. used to declare mastery of an ancient discipline.
They refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of embodied knowledge as a form of knowledge production. It’s one of the reasons I adore one of the earliest Black Feminist writers Anna Julia Cooper’s works so much. I learned about Cooper from another Southern Black Woman bearing the name Cooper… Brittney C. Cooper. In Brittney C. Cooper’s 2017 book entitled Beyond Respectability, she cited Julia Cooper’s fundamental belief “ that we cannot divorce Black women’s bodies from the theory they produce” (Cooper, 2017, 3). Julia Cooper was able to put into words my point of tension with Western practices of critical theory. Do you know Julia Cooper’s work? I believe you would love Brittney C. Cooper’s book from one Southern Black Woman to another. Thinking about our bodies as being the very evidence of the theory that we practice every day was an affirming statement for me to come across. If you weren’t aware of Julia Cooper’s words back then, then I hope this short statement can serve as a balm for your bruises now. In your doc, the literary scholar Eve Dunbar said that you had “an unwillingness to be disciplined in the sense of academic disciplines—anthropology, & disciplined in the sense that she won’t be contained.” Similarly to Audre Lorde, Mattie Nelson, myself, & any other Black Woman trying to craft an assemblage of their life, I believe this unwillingness to be disciplined earned you the label wild. Wild could also be considered loose, nasty, wayward, rouge, & unruly which all ultimately translate to f r e e.
You could’ve accepted Columbia University’s Doctoral curriculum when they denied your independent program of study. However, then you would not have been able to study the communities you were passionate about. Instead, with your gaze to the sun, you took the rouge path & said no. Dunbar’s words to describe you, an unwillingness to be disciplined, reminds me of someone I believe you also would have loved… Shirley Chilsom. Shirley was the first Black woman elected to Congress & the first woman to run for the Democratic Presidential Nominee. Shirley’s campaign slogan for the House of Representatives was unchanged & unbossed. I hope you see the connection between the two of you. I hope you know that your lineage, the theory you embodied, has been passed down & planted in the spirits of so many Black folks who understood your voice exactly how you presented it. I remember being able to read Their Eyes Are Watching God with no problems because it sounded like how my paternal grandmother spoke. I didn’t know you could put that voice, the tone, the pronunciation onto a page until you did it. Your words & anthropological work showed me that there is value in language that English grammar would deem unruly. Maybe the fact that the language is unruly is a good thing. Unruly language & unruly grammar make folks slow down, breathe, pronunciate, & struggle to hold all it contains. Those who aren’t willing to cut through the unruly opaque kudzu language will never understand the subject. This is a possible outcome that I think I am okay with.
Shirley started campaigning in June of 1968 just five months after you passed away. You became an ancestor on January 28th in a segregated nursing home in Fort Pierce Florida. In your latter life with a little more weight, high blood pressure, & working as a maid to support yourself, what did you think about when you looked back on your life? Who was around you in Florida in your later years? When you passed, there was a black deputy who saved your archives from being burned. Even in death, they tried to erase your contributions to the world.
I imagine that’s where the manuscript for Baracoon was when it was saved. Congraulationans Zora! Barracoon was published in 2018 & there’s a film called Decendents on Netflix that talks about the Clotilda, the descendants of Oluale Kossola, & land. I wish it would’ve been published when you were still Earthside. Truthfully, this side of the realm is quickly going to hell in a handbasket. While you definitely were not cared for & revered as you deserve to be in your lifetime, I’m not sure society has much reverence for Poets in my lifetime either. When I say Poets I mean it in the way James Baldwin defines it here. There is still an insistence on having the proper credentials to gain funding, opportunities, connections, & titles. It’s impossible to be an art curator without an advanced degree, some people may not call me an archivist because I don’t have an advanced degree, & there are countless other examples. Yet, no matter how many degrees of respectability one chases it is never going to result in true f r e e d o m. I always thought I would go on to get an advanced degree but as of now, I don’t see it happening. My eyes are too open to the fact that these institutions do not care about me as a person. I’m looking for a space to b r e a t h e & create on my own intuitive time with ample resources. I desire to have these resources in a way where I don’t have to exhaust myself explaining how worthy I am to receive them. I want to focus on the work, love, & liberation. I don’t have much more capacity for anything else. I don’t desire to be spending hours applying for grants in a country that owes me reparations. I don’t desire financial struggle because I want to live an artistically led life. This leads me to my final questions for you Zora. How would you have liked to be supported throughout your life? What would receiving that support, without exerting any more effort, have enabled you to do?
I dream of having a fund with those handfuls of people where we deposit what we can into it monthly. Then, we collectively decide what to do with it. Maybe it’s a fund for the sole purpose of planning a beautiful annual trip together somewhere by the sea. Perhaps the fund enables us to show up for each other when we need it the most. If a dear friend is struggling with their mental health & hasn’t been able to take care of themselves, then we use the fund to order meals from their favorite restaurant for the week. And of course, we would also get them a flower assemblage. If there is an amazing artistic opportunity someone wants to go to but can’t fund it right now, then maybe this collective fund would allow them to take advantage of it. Maybe if someone in the fund is unable to make their rent for a month then they have this joint fund to fall back on.
I dream of living in a world & being in community with people who give money freely & the word loans is not in our vocabulary. In fact, in this new language we have sliced open there is not even a word for loans. I imagine living in a world or community where no one is begging for shoes. Because people can afford to get new ones , fiercely protecting the one shred of upward mobility they have at any cost necessary (such as taking a life) is no longer needed. I imagine a world where there is no such thing as aiming too high. Furthermore, I imagine a world where those that jump for de sun are supported by an abundance of resources including time, money, community, leisure, & rest. I imagine a world where those that jump for de sun actually land on it. If it’s not possible to land on the yellow star we have called a sun for generations then maybe it’s time to aim for a new sun. That is a New Blue Sun.
Zora I wish you could hear New Blue Sun by Andre 3000. It truly is a balm for Lena in The Raisin in the Sun, for you, & generations of Black folk who aimed for the sun & whose options were constricted. When I listen to New Blue Sun I hear both Coltranes (who to this day still have people desperately trying to catch the trane), I hear Sun Ra, I hear 80s Miles Davis, I hear p o s s i b i l i t y. I’ll play it for you when we’re sitting out on the porch together sometime. It’s getting a little chilly down here so I haven’t been out in a while but I will directly. Here’s a sonic playlist for you to listen to until then. I’ll be waiting for your answers in the years to come.
Ase
